HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

holowoodman

868 karma · joined June 21, 2024

submissionscomments
holowoodman··on Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
The owner also has the right to refuse saying anything, in which case it is on the police to prove who the driver was. For cars, that's usually easy, because they just compare the ticket photo to your drivers license photo or passport photo on file. For motorcycles, the ticket photo is usually useless, so if the owner refuses to identify himself or someone else, and the police cannot prove anything, the motorcycle owner goes unticketed.
holowoodman··on Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers
Problem with motorcycles in Germany is, they are usually too fast for the police to catch with their car, and the helmet prevents usable photos of the driver. But unfortunately the laws require that the driver committing the speed/noise/redlight offense is identified and fined, fining the owner by license plate doesn't work (except if the bike was modified).
holowoodman··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
> The occupying powers very much did not assign collective responsibility to Germans after WW2. Material reparations were massively reduced in scope compared to WW1 (and the norms of the previous century), and the Allies actually poured substantial resources into Germany’s reconstruction (far in excess of the reparations).

Mostly because the USSR was the new enemy and Germany had to be an ally after WW2.

While the war was still ongoing there was carpet-bombing of German civilians, and some of the plans for after the war originally included complete destruction of industrial capacities, forced displacement of the population of formerly industrialized areas and forced labour for the whole population (google Morgenthau plans).

holowoodman··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
Low turnout means non-voters just don't care, or that they find no palpable option on the ballot sheet.

In any case, the non-voters are OK with whatever party might win, because otherwise they should have made their vote or created a political party that might be agreeable to them.

holowoodman··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
It is generally impossible in non-free societies to get accurate information about public opinion. It is already hard in free ones. Polls are notoriously unreliable when a topic is considered sensitive even in a free society. People will self-censor and misreport even if they are assured anonymity and wouldn't have to fear consequences beyond social stigma. When a new right-wing fringe party ("AfD") showed up in Germany, they were from day one publically decried as fishy neo-nazis, revisionists, etc., so supporting AfD carries a stigma. (I'm not stating that those accusations are true or untrue, just that they are frequently made in public). This lead to severe underestimations in the first few polls, because people voting for AfD didn't want to tell about it when asked. Nowadays, polls are more accurate because some amount of misreporting is taken into account.

Tales from an insider don't help very much, because people will only report about their own bubble, the city/province/town they live in, their family and friends of similar interest and social status, their workplace, etc. Also, there can be a severe selection bias, people wanting to talk to outsiders on the internet or even leave a country are probably more often critical of a regime and its decisions.

So from the outside, the only sensible thing we can do is see the country as a whole, lump in the government with the people. Because we cannot really know if people think differently and who they are. We cannot isolate or punish "just the government". And if there were a majority against the current government, there would be a revolution at some point. If there isn't one, opposition against the regime just isn't strong enough.

holowoodman··on Download responsibly
One would think so. If AI bros were sensible, responsible and intelligent.

However, the pratical evidence is to the contrary, AI companies are hammering every webserver out there, ignoring any kind of convention like robots.txt, re-downloading everything in pointlessly short intervals. Annoying everyone and killing services.

Just a few recent examples from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45260793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701565

holowoodman··on Download responsibly
Just wait until some AI dudes decide it is time to train on maps...
holowoodman··on Kerberoasting
Corporate IT just forklifted out tons and tons of workstations and laptops for the windows 10 to 11 migration.

Active Directory is just not developed anymore, its basically abandonware that everyone still uses. The new hot stuff is the Azure AD/Entra ID bastardization of Web Auth plus AD that they try to upsell people to.

holowoodman··on Kerberoasting
An actually useful mitigation would be to use service keytabs instead of service passwords. Because with a keytab, the keytab is a file that just contains an AES128/256/RC4 key instead of a password, which makes it sufficiently hard to guess. The service just uses this file to decrypt its service tickets then.

However, keytab usage is rare in the Windows AD world because people don't seem to comprehend what a keytab is and does, and why it is far better than using passwords for services.

holowoodman··on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
I'm guessing that there is a difference between "offshoring, while still having the offshore people picked and employed by you" (let's call it "pure offshoring") and "offshoring and outsourcing to a local company" (let's call it "outsourcing to offshore").

With pure offshoring, you do have control over who you pick, what their mode of work is, whom to fire, etc.

With outsourcing to offshore, the local company hires people, usually on the cheap, to only just fullfill your contract and no more. If people underperform, you may complain, and maybe they'll be moved to a less prominent and visible role, or maybe they'll be shuffled to the next customer of theirs. So things will be bad, because it is not in the interest of the local company to do one iota more than necessary. And you'll still have to have your own QA, architects, etc., to make sure you at least get what you paid for.

holowoodman··on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office
What I wear has an influence. Ties cut off blood supply to the brain, so in fancy attire, I'm less useful.
holowoodman··on Judge Orders Google to Share Search Results to Help Resolve Monopoly
> Google plans to appeal, and the case is likely to be mired in the courts for years.

So after the appeals, the ruling will be even more toothless than it already is...

holowoodman··on Europol said ChatControl doesn't go far enough; they want to retain data forever
Of course. It is far easier to press charges against the victim, because they already have his data and confession.

That's why you just avoid dealing with the police if at all possible.

holowoodman··on Europol said ChatControl doesn't go far enough; they want to retain data forever
Plain old backroom deals. Same way she got the job.

The EU isn't a democracy, it is actually governed by backroom deals between member states' governments.

holowoodman··on Europol said ChatControl doesn't go far enough; they want to retain data forever
You might try your luck then. But law enforcement has shot the homeowners in such cases. They usually arrive late or never at all. They open a case file and then tell you "well, we are not going to do anything, theft has a very low rate of convictions, just give the case number to your insurance".
holowoodman··on Europol said ChatControl doesn't go far enough; they want to retain data forever
> Europol's job would probably be a whole lot easier if they had access to all

Actually I think that that's even a fallacy. More data means more stuff to sift through, more false leads in there, more things to follow up. Watch an episode of House M.D. about full-body-scans in medicine: useless, because only wasted time to follow up on every blotch in the scan.

holowoodman··on Europol said ChatControl doesn't go far enough; they want to retain data forever
Typical. Give them a finger, they take an arm, a leg, your house, your firstborn and all your data.

Every request by law enforcement must be opposed. Do not talk to cops. Do not give them an inch. Ever.

They are insatiable and power-hungry. Nothing will suffice. A police state will still be a million police officers and some stricter laws short.

holowoodman··on A Linux version of the Procmon Sysinternals tool
How is this different from using 'htop' and pressing 's' to strace a process?
holowoodman··on What to do with C++ modules?
There is a big big difference between C and C++. The article is about C++, which is being replaced by Rust imho. C is different, and far more frequently used for embedded or OS development. Don't know about games, but last I looked, stuff like unity was C#, so something else yet again.
holowoodman··on What to do with C++ modules?
Why bother? The world seems to have moved on to Rust, C++ is only for legacy maintenance stuff anymore.
holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
Then prove me wrong with facts, instead of just arguing ad hominem.
holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
Ah. So you determine I'm not in the in-group for the magic circle that is humanities, so I can never appreciate or evaluate them. And you place any evaluation entirely in the subjective realm, such that no objectivity is possible anyways.

So it's not just a matter of taste, humanities are a cult.

holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
So you argue that humanities are like art, cooking, literature, sexual preferences: a matter of personal taste, which I supposedly lack. The general consensus about matters of taste is that it is pointless to argue about those. And that matters of taste are an indulgence, important only to fans of that particular variety.

Which means that humanities cannot be important to mankind as a whole, because most won't appreciate them, as they are a matter of taste. And they are as arbitrary as other matters of taste, lacking the universality that is necessary for usefulness. Good riddance!

holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
So, you accuse me of being uninformed and having an unbalanced understanding.

But where are your arguments, and where is your evidence? Or should I derive from this that all arguments in the humanities boil down to name-calling?

holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
One can graduate in philosophy without having heard a formal logic lecture. Philosophy only has rigor in some branches, most modern ones are less rigorous and more social, political or economical.
holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
Hollywood is part of the economy, but only a small one, around 3% of US GDP. All of arts and entertainment is around 4.5%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...

And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.

holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.

Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.

holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
Wordplay isn't an argument. You learn that when you actually do engineering.
holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
No, you should re-read and understand what exactly failed in the Principia Mathematica. Goedel-Incompleteness only means that either the Principia is short an axiom, or it will produce a contradiction because it already has an axiom too many. Nothing there separates mathematics from logic in any way. Nothing separates coding from mathematics in any way. The only failure the incompleteness proof gives us is that we now know that the Principia will either be found contradictory or incomplete. But that doesn't make it useless at all, our mathematics, coding and logic is still based on the axioms from the Principia and derived proofs. Science works very well with this, our physical description of nature by principia-derived mathematics also didn't turn up any kinds of problems there. The only real failure is the philosophical expectation of being able to generate all mathematical truth from that one set of axioms.

Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.

holowoodman··on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose
The mechanism that lead to this is imho that humanities generally do not have any more grounding in facts, logic or reality. Science, technology and (to some extent) medicine and mathematics are bound to describe existing phenomena that occur in nature. They do this by observation and experiments (except mathematics), proposing axioms and theory, and then bringing those into strict logical agreement. Humanities nowadays reject observation and experiments as biologism. Or they never had those, and always just proposed ideas to be discussed, like in philosophy. They also nowadays reject objective logic and proof in favour of subjective evaluations and a wholly individual-centered world view.

This decline of rigor in the humanities means that they no longer really teach logic, critical thinking, or any kind of reality-related ideas. What they do is arbitrary and therefore objectively pointless, except maybe to further some political or social goal. That those goals are mostly left-wing is imho just an accident, they could as well be promoting right-wing politics.

(In a similar manner, arts now reject their original goals of beauty, aesthetics, depictions of reality, mastery and entertainment. But that's less of a problem, because arts have always been even less important than humanities.)

← PreviousPage 5 of 13Next →